Gradual changes

The revelations, and the questions, began even before we were in the car.

Mom, asked the DQ, when I'm allowed to date, can I date a guy with a pierced lip? She showed me the picture of a boy with so much hair that frankly I couldn't see his lips. Pierced lips are very low down on my potential list of problems -- sure, I said. After all, I'd just denied her, for about the twentieth time since yesterday, a Facebook account.

As it turned out, my Mr. C knew more about dating than he had let on to his parents. His fifth grade class has a custom called "zapping." Someone writes a time on the back of your hand. Then they write a boy or girls name on the inside. At that time, you have to ask that person out.

Simple...only apparently they try to put the name of a person that you don't really like on the inside. "And they always say no," said Mr. C. "I don't get it."

Then the truly amazing bit--last summer at camp, which he had attended for only a week, a girl asked him out to a dance. And he went, dressed in the jeans and baseball hat he had brought (not knowing that perhaps a tux might be better).

She didn't write me back when I wrote her, he said matter of factly. But she told me she'll be at the same session next year...